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Palestinian in America: Najib Joe Hakim’s “Home Away from Home”

Combining photography and oral history recorded onto audio, the Home Away from Home project by Najib Joe Hakim shines light on the experience of Palestinians living in the United States.

Hakim interviewed more than two dozen Palestinian Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area about their relationship to the US and to Palestine, and asked them what home means to them.

The result is a compelling portrait series of Palestinian Americans of various generations — some who were born in Palestine and some who have never stepped foot there.

Some describe dual identity issues common to other immigrant communities in the US. But particular to Arab and Muslim Americans at this moment is being treated as the enemy as the US wages war on or funds occupation in their homelands.

Awareness of Israel’s occupation of Palestine, in some cases witnessed first-hand, fosters not only a sense of obligation to support the struggle for justice there, interviewees said, but also identification with other liberation movements around the globe. Others interviewed by Hakim describe a yearning for the sense of community and belonging so keenly felt back home in Palestine.

“Where is Jaffa?”

Najib Joe Hakim told The Electronic Intifada in an interview (which can be listened to here) that the Home Away from Home project was inspired by his own efforts to grapple with what it means to be a Palestinian in America.

Hakim grew up thinking he was Lebanese, given that he was born in Beirut. He didn’t realize he was Palestinian until high school, when, he says, “my dad told me about riding his bicycle in Jaffa and suddenly it dawned on me: where is Jaffa? And I looked it up and it wasn’t in Lebanon, it was in Palestine. So I asked him about that, and suddenly a whole world opened up to me that was very different from what I had imagined before or understood before.”

That was during the 1970s, when “there was a lot going on in the Middle East and the Palestinians were on the front pages of the newspapers a lot and not in very positive ways, of course. So it kind of mixed up my whole sense of identity and place in the world. I’m much older now and I wanted to see how other people — now that there a lot of other Arabs and Palestinians in this country — how they’re wrestling with living here as a Palestinian.”

“Deepens the connection”

The project was exhibited at San Francisco’s RayKo Photo Center last month and it has been accepted for display at the San Francisco Main Library for autumn 2016 to coincide with Arab American Heritage Month. Hakim hopes to continue to collect interviews and also present the material on a website or in a book.

The black and white portraits were shot on medium format film with an old camera rather than digitally, in keeping with the project’s theme of memory and nostalgia. “Shooting it in film gives it a credibility that digital doesn’t have,” Hakim explained.

Hakim emphasizes the emotional impact of listening to the interviews rather than reading them. ”Hearing a person tell their story creates or deepens the connection that the listener develops with the person telling the story,” he said. ”It’s one thing to read a caption, it’s another to actually hear this person tell you the story while you’re looking at an image of them.”